Vorke V1 Plus Thermal/Fan Fix for Linux

If you have a Vorke V1 Plus that doesn’t want to drive its fan under Linux, or which doesn’t want to shut off the fan after the UEFI turns it on at boot, here’s what worked for me:

1. Make sure you’ve got a kernel version that allows you to manually control the fan via one of the /sys/class/thermal/cooling_deviceX/cur_state nodes. Debian bookworm’s default 6.1.0-13 kernel had problems with that while my Ubuntu 22.04 LTS flash drive’s 6.2.0-16 didn’t, so I wound up pulling one of the 6.5.0 kernels from Debian backports.)
2. Make sure thermald is installed. My experience is that, without it, the Vorke V1 Plus will just leave its fan on whatever the UEFI set it to, no matter how high or low the CPU temperature goes.
3. Write this configuration into /etc/thermald/thermal-conf.xml:

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
   <ThermalConfiguration>
     <Platform>
       <Name>Prefer fan over thermal throttling</Name>
       <ProductName>*</ProductName>
       <Preference>PERFORMANCE</Preference>
     </Platform>
   </ThermalConfiguration>

   As far as I can tell, thermald on Debian bookworm defaults to <Preference>QUIET</Preference>, which means “Thermal throttle as much as you need to in order to avoid spinning up the fan”.
   
   (Which is a neat option for things with shrill fans like the Vorke V1 Plus if I can figure out an easy way to toggle it… maybe reassign the power button from “request a clean shutdown” to “toggle cooling between performance and quiet”.)
   
   There’s probably some other way you’re meant to do this, and I welcome comments from people who actually know how this is supposed to work, because I found thermald to be frustratingly under-documented.
4. Run systemctl edit thermald.service and paste in these lines:

   [Service]
   ExecStart=
   ExecStart=/usr/sbin/thermald --no-daemon --dbus-enable --exclusive-control --config-file=/etc/thermald/thermal-conf.xml

   Without --exclusive-control, I found thermald still allowing temperatures to shoot up without enabling the fan.

As for --config-file, the manpage says /etc/thermald/thermal-conf.xml should be in the default search path, but, without specifying it explicitly, I was still getting no effect, despite neither of the higher-priority paths existing.

4. Reboot (instead of just restarting thermald) to make sure all changes will persist as intended and stress-test the CPU with something like stress --cpu 4.

If you still have trouble, try toggling DPTF enable/disable in the UEFI settings. (hold Delete while powering on, and then go into Advanced > Thermal.)

I don’t know if playing around with DPTF is necessary with the Vorke V1 Plus, but I also have a Vorke V1 and I needed to toggle it on that one so I could memtest86 the RAM upgrade I put in without the thing slowly overheating.

Vorke V1 Plus Thermal/Fan Fix for Linux by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.